Quo Vadis:
Where does an innovative
company go next?

Introduction

When a company is already well
known for its innovation, yet is faced with constantly increasing market
pressures, where does it go? This paper offers an understanding of
innovation based on five maturity levels.

The five levels of innovation maturity

This paper describes five levels of
innovation maturity which can be used to both assess the current position of
a company and to show the way forward.

Level no

Level name

Management style

Individual approach

Critical domain

1

Suppressed

Opposing

Displacement

None / product

2

Enabled

Ignoring

Skunkworks

Near

3

Encouraged

Supporting

Analytic / intuition

Process

4

Educated

Training, structure

Tools, skill

Distant

5

Enlightened

Deep understanding

Appropriate

Strategic

To transition from each level
requires a cultural shift to create and sustain the change the behaviours
that are implicitly required for the next level of innovation maturity. Each
of these maturity levels is described in the sections below.